Ideas

Natalie Paquette, Member in the School of Natural Sciences, is a mathematical physicist whose research interests span string theory and quantum field theory. Most recently, she has been exploring connections between holography and the mathematical...

Arnold J. Levine is Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study and leads the Institute’s Simons Center for Systems Biology in the School of Natural Sciences. An acclaimed leader in cancer research...

In the summer of 1968, a young, newly minted assistant professor moved from a postdoctoral position at Caltech to Princeton University. Schooled and trained over the previous seven years in the reductionist approaches of Watson and Cricks’ molecular...

Lia Medeiros, a Member and astrophysics postdoctoral fellow in the School of Natural Sciences, is interested in using astronomical objects and phenomena to test fundamental theories of physics. She is a winner of the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in...

By the twentieth century, mathematics had advanced into rather abstract realms, transcending its origins, which had been largely driven by questions closer to the natural world. Physics on the other hand, especially after the development of quantum...

In 1989, Joanne Cohn, a physicist then at the Institute for Advanced Study, began distributing TeX files of string theory papers via email. By August of 1991, the email list had grown to 180 physicists—an unwieldy number for Cohn to individually...

During his career, Arnold J. Levine, Professor Emeritus in the School of Natural Sciences, has worked across the biological sciences, from virology and immunology to molecular biology and genetics, and mentored countless scholars.

On September 12 and...

The 2019 Prospects in Theoretical Physics program, "Great Problems in Biology for Physicists," took place July 15–26, 2019, covering topics ranging from virology, cancer, and immunology to machine learning and neural networks. Watch videos from the...

There are two kinds of creation myths: those where life arises out of the mud, and those where life falls from the sky. In this creation myth, computers arose from the mud, and code fell from the sky.

In late 1945, at the Institute for Advanced...

On May 3, 2019, Scott Tremaine, Richard Black Professor in the IAS School of Natural Sciences, gave a lecture on the evidence for a supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way galaxy, denoted Sagittarius A*. The talk focuses on what we know...